If you have
ever found yourself unable to resist just one more Oreo, you’re not alone. That
“stuf” is like crack, neurologically speaking.
A new study
from Connecticut College shows that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine, at least
for lab rats. According to the new study,
eating the iconic black and white cookies activated more neurons in the
rat brain’s “pleasure center” than drugs such as cocaine.
“I haven’t
touched an Oreo since doing this experiment,” neuroscience assistant professor
Joseph Schroeder said in a school press release.
The research
looked at the rats’ behaviors and the effects the cookies had on their brains.
Rats were put into a maze and given the choice of hanging out near rice cakes
or Oreos. The tasty sandwich cookies won that popularity contest handily. Those
results were compared to a different test, where rats were given the choice of
loitering in an area of a maze where they were injected with saline or in
another corner where they could get a shot of cocaine or morphine.
The rats in
the study liked the cookies about as much as they liked the drugs, congregating
near the cookie side of the maze as much as they would on the drug side.
Much like
humans, rats also prefer the delicious creamy center to the cookie. “They would
break it open and eat the middle first,” said Jamie Honohun, one of the
students who worked on the study.
“These
findings suggest that high fat/sugar foods and drugs of abuse trigger brain
addictive processes to the same degree and lend support to the hypothesis that
maladaptive eating behaviors contributing to obesity can be compared to drug
addiction,” Schroeder’s team writes in a statement describing the study.
Not
addictive? Rice cakes. “Just like humans, rats don’t seem to get much pleasure
out of eating them,”Schroeder said.
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